You are here

Book collections

American garden-making has evolved over time, shaped by history, social attitudes, the environment, and new ideas. The books in this collection illustrate this history and complement the exhibition Cultivating America's Gardens produced by the Libraries and Smithsonian Gardens.

The Smithsonian Libraries has one of the premier Native North American language and linguistics collections in the world, resulting from the exceptional work of the Smithsonian Institution since its founding. Many of the early printed texts are the works of missionaries in their endeavor to...

The Freer|Sackler Library's collection of illustrated Japanese rare books includes over 1,000 volumes previously owned by Charles Lang Freer. Often filled with color illustrations, many are by famous artists such as Andō Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai. These beautiful woodblock printed works...

The Smithsonian Libraries has long benefited from the generosity of book collectors who have helped build our world-class museum library system. Our exhibition, Magnificent Obsessions: Why We Collect, tells the captivating stories of the book...

Part history, part coloring book, and part guide to historic books, the Smithsonian Libraries’ Abecedarium: An Adult Coloring Book for Bibliophiles is a contemplative and inspiring way to experience art, science, and...

The Bella C. Landauer Collection of Aeronautical Sheet Music is one of the treasures in the National Air and Space Museum Library. The earliest known aeronautical song was published in 1785. Entitled Chanson sur le Globe Aerostatique,...

Founded in Brooklyn in 1883, the Benjamin Moore company is best known today for their innovative interior and exterior house paints. Smithsonian Libraries collection of Benjamin Moore trade catalogs reveals a variety of products and color trends throughout the company’s history including coach...

From chemistry to couture, feathers to physics, color is a topic that links science, history, art and culture. This collection includes books featured in the exhibition "Color in a new Light" as well as rare and interesting titles from across the Libraries collections that reveal the many ways...

Design Digitized is a collection of rare books from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum Library collection. Digitization was supported in part by funds from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) through the New York State Regional Bibliographic Databases Program.

The companion collection to our exhibition Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction 1780-1910. Travel back to a time when new frontiers of science were emerging. We took to the air, charted remote corners of the earth, and harnessed the...

In the spring of 1849, the newly founded Smithsonian Institution purchased its first collection, a group of European prints and art books assembled by Vermont Congressman George Perkins Marsh. Although unrelated to the Smithsonian’s then primarily scientific orientation, they were viewed as a...

In 1955 Bern Dibner, the noted science book collector and founder of the Burndy Library, published Heralds of Science as Represented by Two Hundred Epochal Books and Pamphlets Selected from the Burndy Library. To construct the list, Dibner selected two hundred items he owned that “proclaimed...

These directories are registers of officers, and sometimes cadets and midshipmen, in the Navy, Marine Corps, and US Naval Reserve for periods including 1776-1887, WW I and WW II. As far as we know, they are not available online elsewhere and are a gold mine of information for genealogical...

The Smithsonian Libraries have been digitizing books since 1996. Many of the first books made available online included explanatory essays by prominent scholars, additional details about the books such as collations, or contextual information that had been researched by library staff or visiting...

Historical publications from the Smithsonian Institution and it's many divisions including the Bureau of American Ethnology. Many of these titles can be found with additional data in the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

The Great War profoundly changed not just the geo-political landcape of Europe, and an entire generation, but also the culture, economics, politics, and technology of countries outside the immediate combatants. To commemorate the United States' entry into World War I in April 1917, we present...

During the United States Exploring Expedition, thousands of plant and animal species unknown to Western science had been discovered and collected; thousands of miles of coastline had been accurately surveyed and mapped for the first time; the peoples of the innumerable islands of the Pacific and...

Books, catalogs, and ephemera from various World's Fairs and Expositions.

Most of the items in this collection were digitized by an outside vendor as part of a special project and are presented as "access copies", that is, they are to be used primarily for informational purposes and do...

Trade catalogs for scientific instruments. This collection represents a sampling of the overall holdings of scientific instrument trade literature in the Smithsonian Libraries. Digitized catalogs are gradually being migrated from the old site http://www.sil.si.edu/DigitalCollections/Trade-...